Trending experiment: take #bryanalvarez worldwide

Friday, 04 November 2011 11:35

We're doing an experiment to see if we can get #bryanalvarez trending worldwide on Twitter. Nothing in WWE trended Monday, which was, believe it or not, a subject of concern among some internally. There's a point to all of this, as discussed on last night's Bryan & Vinny Show. Largely that, well, you don't have to be very popular to trend on Twitter if you go from nobody talking about you to a lot of people talking about you all at the same time.

Nicholas Deleon of The Daily and formerly of CrunchGear writes:

I just wanted to point you guys in this direction seeing as though you had talked about the topic quite a bit on Monday’s podcast:

http://blog.twitter.com/2010/12/to-trend-or-not-to-trend.html

That’s where Twitter defines exactly what “trending” is. It’s not, as WWE seems to believe, a raw measure of popularity, but rather a measure of novelty. Meaning, say, if at 8:30pm nobody was tweeting about Cena, but at 9:05pm several people *suddenly* started tweeted about him it might make the trending list. I sorta see it as the difference between velocity and acceleration.

“Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously. The Trends list is designed to help people discover the 'most breaking' breaking news from across the world, in real-time.”

It would seem to me that WWE’s idea that by trending a whole lot of people all over the world are talking about them is incorrect. It’s that more people were talking about them at that moment in time then they were in the prior moments. Twitter brings up the #wikileaks hashtag from last year as an example: many, many people were talking about it over the course of a day, ie velocity, (thereby making Wikileaks “popular”), but there wasn’t that sudden burst, ie acceleration, that makes something trending.

So anyway, let's get #bryanalvarez trending. If we do, maybe we'll take on Raw Monday.